


Took a Bus to Chinatown

by squanderbird



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, happy silly cutesy times, i'm not sure how either and i wrote it, not angst, oswin: total screaming genius, somehow ended up in 1920s Paris, wahey
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-08
Updated: 2012-10-08
Packaged: 2017-11-15 22:25:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/532436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squanderbird/pseuds/squanderbird





	Took a Bus to Chinatown

**Author's Note:**

  * For [portions_forfox](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=portions_forfox).



It is Paris; it is 1920; it is the all-hours jazz bar three down having swung open its doors to the indigo night air, the energy so taut and lovely you could bite down on it. The kettle shines like mercury and whistles like a sailor. Yellow light and warmth. 

He's half-asleep and refusing to admit it, some rendezvous in the Louvre with Cocteau having sufficently run down his hyperactive tendencies. Her Doctor, eyelids wavering around a yawn, the lurid pulp novel in his grasp wilting a little. Oswin had walked through the catacombs with Zelda Fitzgerald and had a conversation that ranged from mortality to travel to Siamese cats. She goes to quiet the kettle, padding in knitted socks and an overlarge pinstriped shirt, pulling the sleeves of her kitten-soft cardigan over her hands so only the nails are visible, little ovals that glint in the candlelight. She pours the tea, puts in several heaped spoonfuls of sugar, and takes the two teacups back to where they've curled up, a nest of ratty old blankets piled on the floorboards. The jazz music turns slow and achingly sad, dripping into her ears like molasses. Her Doctor hums along, gulping down his tea, his hand on the swell of her hip. His hearts beat an in-sync cacophony beneath his skin; her breaths are gentle and even. 

Oswin dragged herself up on stories of adventure; a book on Victorian lady explorers lies open here even now. The tales always involved bravado, intrigue, danger; facing death chill in the face and laughing, laughing, living so bright that stars envied you, snapping electric synapses. The smell of dust before rain and running pell-mell into a constant, colourful hurricane of chaos. It's not easy being so smart the others in your training fear you, it's not easy longing to see the world when your mother cries for you to stay. She expected so much from this, the endless journeying to-and-fro alongside a man with such great, lonely eyes, her feet swaying, her brain a seasoned, restless wanderer.

She has run all this way in order to come home.


End file.
